Let’s talk about the Savannah Bananas. They’re an exhibition kind of entertainment baseball team, like the Harlem Globe Trotters, but they’re a baseball team in Savannah, Georgia, and they’re just the best. They have some of the best marketing on the internet right now. There’s a lot we can learn from the Savannah Bananas for marketing and branding and customer relationships. They’re just the best. But I want to use a story from when I bought a T-shirt from them and how the Savannah Bananas used the reciprocity principle to make me so excited to get my shirt and so excited that I’m here making a podcast all about them. So you probably wouldn’t think the Savannah Bananas and the reciprocity principle, if you even know what that is. But the reciprocity principle of marketing and human relationships goes like this. Human beings are wired, so we want to do things for each other.
If I do something nice for you, everything in your DNA says you must do something nice back for me. You must reciprocate. That’s where this comes from. And so you’ve probably seen this, if you go into like Sam’s or Costco, they had the little samples, right? You’re walking around the aisles and they had the little sausage balls or whatever it is, and they’ll give you a free sample. Now that is so of course you can taste the product or try the product or whatever, but it’s also the reciprocity principle. They know if you take that little sausage sample, you are much more likely to go buy a box of those sausages because you feel like you need to reciprocate. And that is where the reciprocity principle is really powerful because the reciprocity principle says, if you do something small for me, I feel obligated to reciprocate, but to reciprocate with something even bigger than you gave to me.
So if I give you one sausage ball at Sam’s, you feel like you need to go buy a whole box. Here’s how the Savannah Bananas did this with me. I bought my T-shirt and I got this really nice little email from them and it was super fun and full of personality, but that’s the Savannah Bananas. And I opened the box and I had this cool banana colored yellow paper and my T-shirt was in there. But in addition to my T-shirt, they had two other items that used the reciprocity principle. One was a thank you card, just a nice little card in there that said, thanks for buying the shirt and we hope you enjoy it. And a nice little personal touch. And that made me feel really good. The great thing they did though was in addition to the card, they gave me a sticker.
They gave me a Savannah Bananas decal. Like a five-year-old, I ran to my truck and I put it on the back window of my truck. I love that sticker. Now, I didn’t pay for that sticker. It wasn’t part of our purchase, but that’s the point. I wasn’t expecting it. It was a nice extra surprise they did for me and to reciprocate because I felt so good about that little sticker they gave me. I went and put it on my truck, and I’m talking to you about them right now. Now think about the advertising. They’re going to get out of that sticker and out of this podcast episode and everybody else, I’m going to tell about my experience with the Savannah Bananas and they got all that for the price of a sticker. So think of ways in your business that you can do little extra things, little value added items for your customers that will bond them to you emotionally.
And we at Wewa Films, we do this in two ways. The first one is we do thank you cards. Just like the Savannah Bananas. We do these nice little heavy paper cards. They look really nice, they have nice print on them, and I write a personal note in each one every time we get done with the project. And we’ve had clients take pictures of these cards and text them to us with little thank you notes. Say, thank you so much for sending this. This really made our day. We put it on our bulletin board. It’s sitting on my desk. We love working with you guys. Thank you very much. So that’s one way to do it. Another way we do it, because we’re a video company is when we have clients, we get done with a shoot, a video shoot. We gather all the media, and then sometimes it can be weeks before we get their actual video done for them.
So in the meantime, we give them what we call a little sizzle of their video. It’s usually about a minute long. It’s just a little sampling of what we got on that shoot. It’s like a sneak peek. And clients love these things. They share them on social media. They talk about them all the time. They love their little sizzles because they weren’t expecting it. It was an extra little valuable thing we do for them. So they get this bonus. That’s why we like bonuses. That’s what bonds people to your brand emotionally. And when they are emotionally bonded to your brand, they will tell their friends. They will put a sticker on their truck. They will refer you to other people. That’s how you can use the reciprocity principle. So think of little ways you can add extra valuable items to your clients little items. You can give them little gestures. You can show them that, show them you love them, that show them you appreciate their business and you want to do something extra they weren’t expecting. They might just reciprocate in a big way. You can do it. I love you.